Douglas sponsored the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which addressed the sticky question
of how to deal with the legality of slavery in new territories entering the
union. The Kansas-Nebraska Act resolved this by “choice.” Residents would vote
to decide if slavery would be legal in their territory.

Lincoln challenged Douglas’s “pro-choice” position on slavery. According to
Douglas, said Lincoln, “…the principle of the Nebraska Bill was very old; that
it originated when God made man and placed good and evil before him, allowing
him to choose for himself, being responsible for the choice he should make.”

No, said Lincoln. “God did not place good and evil before man, telling him to
make his choice. On the contrary, he did tell him there was one tree, of the
fruit of which he should not eat, upon pain of certain death.”

Our constitution, conveyed by the nation’s founders 65 years before Lincoln
spoke those words, circumvented the question of slavery, permitting the great
paradox of a nation founded on the ideals of freedom, which allowed slavery.

The struggle for racial justice in America – whether fighting slavery, or
fighting for civil rights - has always been informed by absolute standards of
right and wrong, of good and evil, that transcend even the cleverest human mind.
Black history is testimony to where we wind up when those standards get lost.

Yet, once again, those standards have gotten lost. And, once again, black
Americans are bearing the brunt of the cost of a nation that has lost its moral
rudder. This time as result of wantonly legal and available abortion.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, blacks accounted for 35.4 percent
of abortions performed in 2009, despite representing, according to the 2010
census, just 13.6 percent of the US population.

Let’s not be deluded that this is an accident.

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Analysis of 2010 census data by an initiative called Protecting Black Life shows
that 79 percent of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics are located in walking
distance of minority neighborhoods – 62 percent within 2 miles of primarily
black neighborhoods and 64 percent of Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods.

Before the Civil War, there were church going Americans who rationalized slavery
by believing that blacks were less than human. This view was legally formalized
in the US Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision.

It is not surprising that our first “pro-choice” Senator, Stephen Douglas,
supported the Dred Scott decision.

Views echoing Dred Scott help rationalize Planned Parenthood’s targeted
destruction of black children in the womb.

In 1957, Mike Wallace interviewed Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger,
and asked her if she believed in sin.

Sanger, whose racist and eugenicist views are well documented, replied, “I
believe the biggest sin in the world is parents bringing children into the world
that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a
human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked
when they are born.”

It is a sign of these dismally confused times that it was our first black
president, Barack Obama, who, last week, became the first sitting American
president to address Planned Parenthood.

In his address, the President did not use the word “abortion” once, nor was
there a single reference to the current trial and murder charges against
Philadelphia abortion Doctor Kermit Gosnell.

You’d think he was addressing Ronald McDonald House, not an organization that
provided 333,964 abortions last year, disproportionately on black women.

Black unemployment and poverty rates are almost double the national averages. I
suppose Planned Parenthood, with support from our president, and $542 million in
taxpayer funds, feels it is doing its part to solve this problem.

Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal
and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based
public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle
Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do
About It.